I am a semi-professional photographer and relatively new to the field.

My main gig is to provide event photography for a major international musical organization at their annual International Conference. This conference usually last 4 days and is chalked full of events and concerts. It is a huge undertaking to document it all well photographically.

We typically publish 1 or 2 photos from each event online for anyone to see. This is good PR for the organization. We also print several images in their print journal as a part of the conference report.

The photography is getting to the point where we are often asked by artists to share high-res photos for their use and we have always complied and never charged for it.

I have several ideas on how we can commercialize these efforts and would like to get responses from the pros on here about how to price and whether it would be worth it to start charging for our work.

If this is possible, what I would want to sell is a CD or DVD of all the images from the entire event. These would be "medium res" images similar to those we publish for free on our web site. The difference would be there would be a lot more of them. How would you price this?

Then, we would like to sell prints and/or high res digital images of individual photos through Smugmug or Zenfolio or some similar service. Again, how would you price this?

Thank you for your feedback. I'm going to post this on the cafe as well.

Well when you say "we" are you speaking about yourself or the organization? Ie who is going to make and keep the money? Obviously that person needs to have the copyright for the images. Honestly it sounds like a "works made for hire" situation where you are an employee of the organization and they own all works created by you in your job. So I guess "we" is the organization. Hopefully you can work out an revenue sharing agreement, but honestly it sounds like they have every right to do this and cut you out of any additional revenue. Obviously this is speculation on my part and it can only be determined by the contract or employment agreement you have with the organization.

To the point of the question however....
I agree that I think a large all encompassing group of images will only appeal to a small subset of the attendees. You would have to price it pretty low to attract a lot of people. You would need to look at it like a high volume, low profit proposition.

However, you could (and should) appeal to the individual performers and try to sell a package to them. This could be a much higher profit and lower volume deal. Of course you will need to work the packages to probably include a one year limited usage agreement or something along those lines for the provided images.